Cornell Capa, 90, renowned photog

He shot for Life magazine

May 24, 2008|By PHILIP GEFTER The New York Times

NEW YORK — Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death, of natural causes, was announced by Phyllis Levine, communications director at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.

In Mr. Capa's nearly 30 years as a photojournalist, the professional code to which he steadfastly adhered is best summed up by the title of his 1968 book The Concerned Photographer. He used the phrase often to describe any photographer who was dedicated to doing work that contributed to the understanding and well-being of humanity and who produced "images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism."

The subjects of greatest interest to Mr. Capa as a photographer were politics and social justice. He covered both presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and also became a good friend of Stevenson. He covered John F. Kennedy's successful presidential run in 1960, and then spearheaded a project in which he and nine fellow Magnum photographers documented the young president's first 100 days, resulting in the book Let Us Begin: The First One Hundred Days of the Kennedy Administration. (He got to know the Kennedys well; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would become one of the first trustees of the ICP.)

In Argentina, Mr. Capa documented the increasingly repressive tactics of the Peron regime and then the revolution that overthrew it. In Israel, he covered the 1967 war. The vast number of picture essays he produced on assignment ranged in subject from Christian missionaries in the jungles of Latin America to the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia during the Cold War, the elite Queen's Guards in England and the education of mentally retarded children in New England.

Mr. Capa had three important incarnations in the field of photography: successful photojournalist; champion of his older brother Robert Capa's legacy among the greatest war photographers; and founder and first director of the International Center of Photography, which, since it was established in 1974, has become one of the most influential photographic institutions for exhibition, collection, and education in the world.

Born Cornel Friedmann on April 10, 1918, in Budapest Hungary, he was the youngest son of Dezso and Julia Berkovits Friedmann, who were assimilated, non-practicing Jews.